The odd case of the gift voucher and the alien

For the lack of something better to do, I typed in “voucher” into eBay. Give it a try.

Now there are some things in there I do understand - holiday vouchers that people don’t want, that sort of thing. Even the sharks who are selling discount codes for a pound that you can find elsewhere (look here) make sense - if you can sell something that costs you nothing - why not?

But then there’s the vouchers for places like HMV and Next. A £10 HMV voucher is currently going for £9 plus 50p delivery. I can understand why the seller might not want it, but who the hell can be bothered buying it for a 50p profit? If you won it for a fiver then fine, but 50p? I suppose as soon as one of these comes up they just put a bid on of £9 and then hope no-one else bids.

Seems bizarre to me, but not as bizarre as this. £35 of Next vouchers went for £34.44 plus £1.10 delivery. What the hell? Who’s paying 66p more for vouchers than if they bought them themselves? Maybe they did a cost benefit analysis and included bus fare into town or the delivery charge from the Next website. Maybe they’re housebound. Or maybe they’re stupid.

I decided to find out.

Five days later and some investigative journalism and no-one got back to me from three different auctions I found. So I found this instead.